Rick Perry helps explain why Tuesday’s election matters

Texas Democratic Gubernatorial candidates Andrew White (left) and Lupe Valdez wait for the start of their debate Friday May 11, 2018 at St. James Episcopal Church in Austin. The debate was moderated by ... more

Texas Democratic Gubernatorial candidates Andrew White (left) and Lupe Valdez wait for the start of their debate Friday May 11, 2018 at St. James Episcopal Church in Austin. The debate was moderated by political writer Gromer Jeffers of The Dallas Morning News. less

Photo: Edward A. Ornelas, Staff / San Antonio Express-News

2 of 4

Dallas County Sheriff Lupe Valdez attends and speaks at the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project Willie Velásquez Benefit Dinner on Wednesday, May 9, 2018. Valdez is in a run-off against Andrew White ... more

Dallas County Sheriff Lupe Valdez attends and speaks at the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project Willie Velásquez Benefit Dinner on Wednesday, May 9, 2018. Valdez is in a run-off against Andrew White for the Democratic pick for Texas governor. The winner between Valdez and White will run against incumbent Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott. (Kin Man Hui/San Antonio Express-News) less

Photo: Kin Man Hui, Staff / San Antonio Express-News

3 of 4

Democratic candidate for governor Andrew White announces his plan for revamping Texas education at a news conference in Austin on April 18, 2018.

Photo: Tom Reel, Staff / San Antonio Express-News

4 of 4

Rick Perry, U.S. secretary of energy, speaks during the Americas Society/Council of the Americas (AS/COA) conference at the U.S Department of State in Washington, D.C., U.S., on Tuesday, May 8, 2018.

Photo: Andrew Harrer / Bloomberg

Early voting began this week for Texas’s 2018 Republican and Democratic primary runoff elections, which will be held on May 22.

Most Texas voters won’t participate in either. And if you assume that Texas is still a safely red state, you might not see much reason to pay attention to this year’s runoffs. Several statewide officials were challenged in the Republican primary, held on March 6, but none of them were defeated; in Harris County, for example, there are only a few lingering questions for Republican voters.

However, you shouldn’t assume that Texas is still a safely red state. It isn't. As we all know, Democrats haven’t won statewide office in Texas since 1994. That’s the longest winning streak in the country, for Republicans.

But one of those Republicans was Rick Perry, who is arguably the most underrated politician in state history--and whose electoral record, in Texas, illustrates why this year’s primary runoffs are more consequential than most. Through his absence. Perry benefited from Republican strength in Texas — but it was strength he helped create.

Perry, who now serves as secretary of energy, began his political career in 1984, when he was elected to the Texas House. He went on to become the state’s agriculture commissioner, then its lieutenant governor, then its governor--a position he held for fourteen years before deciding to step down, in 2014.

It was over the course of his career that Texas underwent its political transformation, which was no mere coincidence. In 1984, Democrats controlled the state government. The Speaker of the Texas House, Gib Lewis, was a Democrat. So were the lieutenant governor, Bill Hobby, and the governor, Mark White.

Three decades later, Texas had become a one-party Republican state, in which the notion of Democrats winning statewide office strikes many observers on both sides of the aisle as a farcical suggestion, and probably an ideologically motivated one.

Oddly, observers rarely point to Perry as someone who may have played a role in this change. That’s perhaps because he was the beneficiary of a few lucky breaks, along the way.

Perry became agriculture commissioner in 1990 by unseating the Democratic incumbent, Jim Hightower. That was considered an upset. But his re-election, in 1994, was not; he was an incumbent Republican running down-ballot from a well-regarded senator, Kay Bailey Hutchison, and an intriguing newcomer, George W. Bush.

And Bush, of course, went on to be elected president, in 2000. So Perry, who was elected lieutenant governor in 1998, became governor without having campaigned for that office in the first place.

And Perry experienced a few high-profile setbacks, over his years at the helm of the state. In 2006, for example, he was re-elected with just 39% of the vote. In 2012, his bid for the Republican presidential nomination ended in ignominious defeat.

But during the course of all those years, Perry never actually lost an election in Texas, in the primary or the general. It’s impossible to explain away all of his victories, some of which were genuine upsets, or to dismiss them on the basis that he was a Republican, and Texas is a red state. Perry was a Democrat when he served in the Texas House. He didn’t become a Republican until he ran statewide, in 1990--at which point Democrats still had the upper hand in Texas.

But Perry’s winning streak is longer than that of his adoptive party itself. In retrospect, he surely deserves some credit--or blame--for its subsequent success.

His successor, Greg Abbott, was elected in a landslide, in 2014, as were all the Republicans who ran statewide that year. But the 2014 gubernatorial election was effectively a referendum on Perry’s performance as governor. This year’s will be a referendum on Abbott’s.

And so the 2018 primary runoffs are more consequential than usual. Democratic voters have yet to settle on a gubernatorial candidate. The choice is between Lupe Valdez, the longtime sheriff of Dallas County, or the Houston-based businessman Andrew White. And whomever wins gets to run against the uninspiring Abbott, as opposed to Perry, a genuine powerhouse.

If you assume that Texas is a safely red state, it doesn’t matter which of them wins the nomination. But remember, the state seemed safely blue in 1990, when a little-known Democratic member of the state legislature decided to run, as a Republican, for agriculture commissioner.

Erica Grieder joined the Houston Chronicle, as a metro columnist, in 2017. Prior to that she spent ten years based in Austin, reporting on politics and economics, as the southwest correspondent for The Economist, from 2007-2012, then as a senior editor at Texas Monthly, from 2012-2016. In 2013, she published her first book, "Big, Hot, Cheap, and Right: What America Can Learn from the Strange Genius of Texas." An Air Force brat, Erica thinks of San Antonio as home. She is a member of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas's Emerging Leaders Council, and holds degrees from the University of Texas at Austin's LBJ School of Public Affairs and Columbia University, where she majored in philosophy.